School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item'Alien Hordes': A cultural history of non-native birds in Australia( 2024-03)From 1788, settlers introduced a host of organisms to the Australian continent. They did so largely deliberately, with high hopes, and often viewed these species with immense fondness. Yet now many of these species are labelled ‘invasive’ and killed at will. This about-turn requires explanation. This thesis traces settler Australians’ changing attitudes towards nonnative wildlife from the late 1820s to the present. Taking a longitudinal approach and focusing in particular on wild birds, it describes how the language, imagery and sentiments surrounding non-native wildlife changed over this period, as well as accounting for why these changes occurred. I closely read public texts – books, lectures, pamphlets, parliamentary debates and, above all, articles from periodicals – in order to uncover the suppressed colonial and racial anxieties underlying seemingly rational and scientific discussion of avifauna. I use species such as the house sparrow, the red-whiskered bulbul and the common myna as case studies to challenge established narratives about the rise and fall of the acclimatisation movement in Australia and to explain why the settler public’s hostility towards and anxiety about non-native wildlife grew so dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Much has been written about non-native wildlife in Australia, but little of this is adequately historicised; almost all of it is highly scientistic, taking for granted the current (and much contested) orthodoxy of ‘anekeitaxonomy’, that is, the classification and judgement of species by their geographical origin. Although the great reversal in attitudes may appear to be justified by ‘improving’ ecological knowledge, I argue that it is best understood in the context of settler colonialism as a system that generates ideas about who and what belongs to the land. As settlers’ understanding of their own belonging in the continent has changed, this has influenced their perceptions of and attachments to wild animals, native and non-native alike. Ultimately, this is not a story of empirical fact but one of culture, values and how these have changed over the course of Australia’s colonial history.
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Item'In our lifetime': the gay and lesbian movement and Australian society, 1969-1978( [1998])The social standing of lesbians and gay men has been transformed dramatically in Australia in the past thirty years. From a group which was marginalised to the point of invisibility, vilified, and discriminated against, we have moved towards the social and political mainstream. Or rather, the mainstream has moved towards us. Laws, administrative and bureaucratic practices and professional and public opinion have all been recast. This thesis is concerned to explore the parameters of this transformation and to explain it. To do this, it relies upon recent developments in social movement theory which have focused attention upon the conditions within which social movements arise and the ways in which, having come into existence, they tap into, and transform, generally-available repertoires of action, organisation and thought. The resource-mobilising capacity of social movements where resources are to be understood very broadly - allows them to have a very much greater impact than the actions of individuals alone. The diversity of their activities and ideas allows them to operate very flexibly - to seize opportunities, appeal to a variety of audiences, engage in a very much wider range of actions, than can political parties, lobby groups and other more conventional forms of political activism. The gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s demonstrated all the characteristics of the social movements which have been studied and theorised internationally, though its historic context is, as I demonstrate in Part One, rather unique. The absence of any deeply-rooted or extensive public homophobia in the Australia of the 1950s is important, though it was only with the emergence of a new liberalism in the second half of the 1960s that homosexuality found voice. The rise of the movement in the radical climate of the 1970s gave it access to a variety of ideas, forms of action and means of organising, as well as a number of different audiences liberal and radical and counter-cultural. But it is important to recognise that, in mobilising against 'society', the movement was, in fact, mobilising against attitudes, practices and policies concentrated in a number of different sectors (or realms or arenas). The thesis, in order to capture this, focuses upon both the broad questions of movement-formation and transformation and upon a number of sectors on which it acted. In particular, I examine, as case-studies, the campaigns around the medical profession, the Anglican Church and the Victorian teachers' unions, examining the ways in which, in each of these sectors, specific tactics were deployed, specific goals sought and different outcomes achieved.